From the Introduction:
The Making of a Divorce Culture

DIVORCE is now part of everyday American life. It is embedded in our laws and institutions, our manners and mores, our movies and television shows, our novels and children's storybooks, and our closest and most important relationships. Indeed, divorce has become so pervasive that many people naturally assume it has seeped into the social and cultural mainstream over a long period of time. Yet this is not the case. Divorce has become an American way of life only as the result of recent and revolutionary change.

The entire history of American divorce can be divided into two periods, one
evolutionary and the other revolutionary. For most of the nation's history,
divorce was a rare occurrence and an insignificant feature of family and social
relationships. In the first sixty years of the twentieth century, divorce
became more common, but it was hardly commonplace. In 1960, the divorce rate
stood at a still relatively modest level of nine per one thousand married
couples. After 1960, however, the rate accelerated at a dazzling pace. It
doubled in roughly a decade and continued its upward climb until the early
1980s, when it stabilized at the highest level among advanced Western
societies. As a consequence of this sharp and sustained rise, divorce moved
from the margins to the mainstream of American life in the space of three
decades.

Ideas are important in revolutions, yet surprisingly little attention has been
devoted to the ideas that gave impetus to the divorce revolution. Of the scores
of books on divorce published in recent decades, most focus on its legal,
demographic, economic, or (especially) psychological dimensions. Few, if any,
deal fully with its intellectual origins. Yet trying to comprehend the divorce
revolution and its consequences without some sense of its ideological origins,
is like trying to understand the American Revolution without taking into
account the thinking of John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, or Thomas Paine. This
more recent revolution, like the revolution of our nation's founding, has its
roots in a distinctive set of ideas and claims.

This book is about the ideas behind the divorce revolution and how these ideas
have shaped a culture of divorce. The making of a divorce culture has involved
three overlapping changes: first, the emergence and widespread diffusion of a
historically new and distinct set of ideas about divorce in the last third of
the twentieth century; second, the migration of divorce from a minor place
within a system governed by marriage to a freestanding place as a major
institution governing family relationships, and third, a widespread shift in
thinking about the obligations of marriage and parenthood.

Beginning in the late 1950s, Americans began to change their ideas about the
individual's obligations to family and society. Broadly described, this change
was away from an ethic of obligation to others and toward an obligation to
self. I do not mean that people suddenly abandoned all responsibilities to
others, but rather that they became more acutely conscious of their
responsibility to attend to their own individual needs and interests. At least
as important as the moral obligation to look after others, the new thinking
suggested, was the moral obligation to look after oneself.

This ethical shift had a profound impact on ideas about the nature and purpose
of the family. In the American tradition, the marketplace and the public square
have represented the realms of life devoted to the pursuit of individual
interest, choice, and freedom, while the family has been the realm defined by
voluntary commitment, duty, and self-sacrifice. With the greater emphasis on
individual satisfaction in family relationships, however, family well-being
became subject to a new metric. More than in the past, satisfaction in this
sphere came to be based on subjective judgments about the content and quality
of individual happiness rather than on such objective measures as level of
income, material nurture and support, or boosting children onto a higher rung
on the socioeconomic ladder. People began to judge the strength and "health" of
family bonds according to their capacity to promote individual fulfillment and
personal growth. As a result, the conception of the family's role and place in
the society began to change. The family began to lose its separate place and
distinctive identity as the realm of duty, service, and sacrifice. Once the
domain of the obligated self, the family was increasingly viewed as yet another
domain for the expression of the unfettered self.

These broad changes figured centrally in creating a new conception of divorce
which gained influential adherents and spread broadly and swiftly throughout
the society -- a conception that represented a radical departure from earlier
notions. Once regarded mainly as a social, legal, and family event in which
there were other stakeholders, divorce now became an event closely linked to
the pursuit of individual satisfactions, opportunities, and growth.